Motorists in Nairobi will from Friday pay parking fees using a new system developed by the county as the local government parts ways with the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA).
Director of parking at the Nairobi City County Tom Tinega says they have finalized the new system, which disengages the one that currently links payment made by motorists to KRA.
Nairobi county governor Johnson Sakaja said on Monday the devolved unit had severed links with the taxman regarding collection of levies reverting the function to its officials. “We are finalizing our systems and the public will be notified before the end of the week of the new short code that they will be using in paying for their parking fees,” said Mr Tinega.
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Currently, motorists dial *647# for payment of parking fees, which is directly linked to the KRA account. Mr Tinega said some of the reasons why they are disengaging KRA is that the process was marred with a lot of secrecy and they did not know how much was being collected.
“We were never allowed to know how the system was operating or even have a hint of how much had been collected in a day,” he said.
Mr Sakaja said the decision to strip KRA of the role was informed by the fact that the taxman was not meeting set targets previously attained by county officials when they were in charge of that function.
Mr Tinega said they are at the moment doing some test runs to ensure the system works efficiently once they migrate to it.
KRA took the role of collecting tax on behalf of Nairobi county in March 2020 with officers allowed full and unlimited access to county revenue.
SOURCE: Business daily
